Dialogues of Naguib Mahfouz: A passion for the arts By Mohamed Salmawy Naguib Mahfouz had a great passion for the arts. All art forms are connected, he would say. "Poetry and music, fiction and painting, they are all interrelated." When he was young, Mahfouz used to attend art shows and read about the history of art. And he contributed articles to an art magazine published by Kamel Al-Telmesani. It was through Al-Telmesani that Mahfouz met such artists as Ramsis Younan and Fouad Kamel. "Al-Telmesani was a dear friend and a man with encyclopaedic knowledge. He read everything, from literature to psychology, from history to music. His love for literature and my love for plastic arts brought us closer. I discovered that he had an extensive collection of literary works, and I would often borrow books from him, or lend him some of mine." "And when did your attachment to plastic arts begin?" I asked. "My first exposure to the plastic arts was in the late 1920s, when I was about to finish high school. I remember reading an article by Al-Aqqad about an artist called Mahmoud Said. This was kind of unusual, for art wasn't really big back then. So for someone like Al-Aqqad to write a whole article about an artist was a bit of a shock. After that, I learned that Said came from a prominent family and had a brilliant career in the judiciary, a career that he abandoned to dedicate his life to art. From then on I made a point of going to all Said's exhibitions. There used to be an annual art exhibition in which all artists showed their work in Ibrahim Pasha Street in Cairo. That was before solo exhibitions became fashionable. It was through this exhibition that I came to know the big artists of my time. Some of Said's paintings are still imprinted on my mind: The Girls of Bahari, the Liquorice Merchant, and those splendid portraits of countryside women." Mahfouz was so impressed by Said that he too switched careers, abandoning philosophy for fiction writing. "I was so enamoured with art that I wanted to know everything about it. So I went out and bought a book about the history of arts from the Pharaohs to Picasso. I still have this book, Outline of Art, to this day. Everyday I would open the book on a new painting, and that would be my painting of the day. I would read everything about the painting and the artist, Van Gogh or Toulouse de Lautrec, for example. Or perhaps the page would have a scene from Hatshepsut's Temple." "And has your literary work been influenced by your passion for the plastic arts?" Mahfouz replied: "I think my work has been affected not only by the plastic arts but by music and poetry, but I leave this to others to decide."
